How Do Young Adults Use Technology in Their Relationships?

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Technology may play a significant role in how people interact with their romantic partners. This is particularly true for young adults, whose relationships tend to be less stable and less committed than those of older adults. Young adults also tend to be heavy technology users. The vast majority of young adults in America use technology to communicate. Surveys show that 95% of adults 18 to 29 text, and 90% use social media. In fact, almost 75% use at least five different social media platforms. Given this high frequency of use, technology is bound to be a major part of how people interact with romantic partners and discuss their romantic relationships. In a new study just published in Personal Relationships, Ishita Munshi and colleagues conducted interviews with young adults to discuss the ups and downs of using technology in their romantic relationships.

Technology presents opportunities to both help and harm romantic relationships. On the positive side, it gives people another avenue to communicate with their partner more frequently and build intimacy. Social media can also give people a way to publicly validate their relationship. On the negative side, social media can create jealousy and conflicts can arise when partners are distracted by their phones. At its most extreme, technology use can be part of a pattern of cyber abuse.

The researchers used data collected from interviews of 121 young adults (aged 18 to 25), that included a diverse set of people form a variety of educational backgrounds and ethnic groups. From analyzing the interview transcripts, several themes emerged, highlighting both the costs and benefits of technology use in relationships.

Benefits

Efficient Communication: This was the most often discussed theme by the interviewees. Almost a third described how texts, calls, and social media made it easier to communicate with partners. Participants described how technology allows partners to stay connected because they can send messages throughout the day, even when they're apart.

Internet Language: Many respondents also discussed how technologies create their own distinctive language, such as the ability to use emojis to communicate. Technology provides people with unique ways to portray the relationship, such as through photos, or ways of discussing relationships in general, such as sharing relationship memes or relationship quizzes.

Emerging Social Network Sites: Many respondents also noted that the large number of social network sites available affected how they communicated about their relationships. The existence of multiple social media platforms gives people the opportunity to connect even more, but it also increases the extent to which the relationship is public.

Initiating Relationships: Technology has also provided young adults with a way to begin new relationships. This wasn’t a major theme, but 6% of respondents did mention that they used technology to find partners, such as using dating apps or social media sites. These users cited the benefits of being able to meet different kinds of people that you might not encounter in your daily life.

Maintaining Long-Distance Relationships: Respondents in long-distance relationships described the advantages of using technology to increase closeness with partners when they aren't able to be together physically. Partners can keep up with each other's activities through texting or social media, or feel closer through having video chats or sharing sexually explicit photos.

Relationship Disclosure: Respondents also described how technology made it easier for them to disclose their relationship status to other people. About 10% of the respondents mentioned that social media allows you to make your relationship status known to others, and can help you to check on the relationship status of other people.

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Costs

Some costs involved communication and interaction:

Impersonal Communication: The text interface itself is less personal. It's also often the case that partners are texting one another while they're engaged in other activities. This means that the interaction with the partner doesn't have their full attention, making it less intimate. Some respondents also expressed concerns about the way that technology makes it easier to avoid intense conversations. The speed of communication was also cited as a barrier to effective communication, as it allows people little time to compose their thoughts and think about how they want to approach a partner about a difficult issue.

Expectation for Constant Communication: About 10% of the interviewees reported feeling pressured to respond to messages immediately, or becoming irritated if they didn't receive an immediate response. Even though people realize that their partners could be busy at a particular moment, they still couldn't always avoid feeling that they were being ignored. This constant connection also prevents people from having space to process relationship events on their own.

Misinformation: These communications can be prone to inaccuracies. With text-based messages, the sender's meaning may not be clear, leading to misinterpretations. It's also easier for gossip to spread across one's social network due to the public and immediate nature of social media.

Several costs involved publicized behaviors:

Less Privacy: About one third of participants reported privacy concerns. The relationship itself becomes less private as partners share information and post photos of themselves on social media, where they become publicly available to a large number of people. Privacy between partners is also violated, since both what you post about yourself and what others post about you can be easily viewed by your partner.

Oversharing: About 10% of respondents reported concerns about partners oversharing intimate information about the relationship on social media.

Permanency: Information people post about their relationships or interactions with partners that occur over social media can become permanent. Even if the original poster deletes the content, others may have saved it, so it's difficult to guarantee that the information is really gone.

Meddling: Some participants complained that social media made it easier for others, outside of the relationship, to try to interfere with it.

Finally, some costs addressed unhealthy relationship behaviors:

Glamourized Relationship Goals: Because people tend to post about the happy moments in their relationships, it creates an impression that other people's relationships are much more ideal than they really are. This can lead to feeling inferior about the quality of your own relationship. This issue was described by about a quarter of the respondents.

Cyberdating abuse (including cyber-stalking and cyber-monitoring): Technology can make it easier for people to engage in abusive behaviors. Social media allows partners to obsessively follow each other's actions and who they're talking to. Mobile technologies allow partners to monitor each other’s actions by looking at their phone or tracking their location. These more problematic behaviors were only mentioned by a few of the participants.

In Sum

This research shows that there are many potential costs and benefits to using technology in our romantic relationships. Technology can make it easier to stay connected with partners and keep other people informed about the relationship. But these same benefits can turn into costs when there is pressure to stay constantly connected, a substitution of superficial text-based communication for more intimate interactions, increased ability to stalk or monitor one's partner, and a lack of privacy. Having a greater awareness of these potential costs and benefits may help you to use technology more effectively in your own relationships and avoid some of the potential pitfalls.